@James
I don't think that Aickman was at all liberal in real life, tho. Like, at all.

Huh? I never said this. Where did this come from?

Of course I don't think Aickman was left-wing. He's my favourite damn writer. I have read his autobiographies. He DESPISED socialism, feminism, etc. He was an unashamed social class elitist to what would today be deemed a shock jock level of behaviour. What I said was that his political views were evident from his work and often prominent, which they are. His stories teem with, often witty, aphorisms that display his political beliefs.

I don't see any indication of these views in Aickman's fiction. I just read The Late Breakfasters last month, and the novella strikes me as spoofing class elitism if not directly pointing out its hypocrisy and nastiness. Likewise, it and several of his stories - No Stronger Than A Flower comes immediately to mind - rather easily lend themselves to a feminist reading. I don't know Aickman's personal views - I've only read his fiction - but if he was a stodgy class elitist and anti-feminist, it doesn't show in his work.

I think a lot of people learn about an artist's political views and then hastily project them onto the artist's entire body of work. I know I dwell on defending Lovecraft's fiction, but I doubt that it would be as controversial as it's become lately if so much of Lovecraft's personal correspondence hadn't been made public. I don't deny how racist he was personally, but now some people put far more into his fiction than is actually there - judging from some recent comments I've read at The Verge, they practically take The Call of Cthulhu as an excerpt from Mein Kampf.

Likewise, others here have stated that don't see the antinatalism in Ligotti's fiction, to which I more or less agree.

Stephen King, on the other hand, has written overtly political fiction - but I don't think his politics are obvious in everything he's written.

I think Speaking Mute is largely correct about the letters. Personally, I wouldn't have had the integrity of Derleth in publishing the racist rants. And I wish he hadn't but he was a man of honor. Yet, strange as it may seem, Derleth never believed Lovecraft was a racist. He argued that feelings of inferiority were at the root of racism (a common enough belief in those days) and that Lovecraft's "distaste" for immigrants and minorities arose, instead, from seeing sections of his beloved Providence turned into ghetto-like slum areas.

But I believe another reason why Lovecraft is attacked so often--while other writers of that time aren't-- is simply that Lovecraft's central message -- the insignifigance of man in an absurd universe-- is far more contemporary in essence and provokes far more response than the work of other writers of his time. In other words, critics respond to his work as they would to the works of a living writer .

It wouldn't surprise me if Ligotti's fiction is regarded in the far future in a similar fashion. No doubt some critics will then accuse him
of -- what else? --promoting a Death Cult lol.

That sounds like Gnosticism. Is the story only available to initiates?

"What lay behind me was no longer any normal, familiar life, that everyday life out of which the impulse to pray raises us, with still at the back of our minds that whensoever we wish we can return. A void was behind me. And in front a wall, a wall of darkness." Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest